All I Want for Christmas is Another 5,126 Years

Today is December 21st, 2011, and unless you’ve been living under a rock the size of the Sun Stone, you have heard at least a little about the end of the Maya Long Count – the calendar used by the people of the storied Central American empire to keep track of events in the greater span of time – and the fact that said end is schedule to occur one calendar year from today. My ancestors, the Aztecs, had their own ideas about the cycle of the worlds, but it was their neighbors to the south who captured the world’s attention and imagination.

Yet for all the hoopla (so much of which is based on inaccurate information and the sort of fear-mongering that accompanies any sort of long-anticipated event), the end of the Long Count will bring not (let us hope) mountains of bubbling lava, or death from the stars in the form of the incredibly-unimaginatively-named “Planet X,” or a new television series starring one of the Kardashians; instead, it marks the end of a 5,126-year period and – far from bringing doom – was seen as a time of auspicious renewal by the Maya, much in the same way contemporary peoples mark the end of the year with a celebration of new opportunities and new chances to completely ignore the Stairmaster.

It’s tempting to endow this event with some sort of mystical significance; after all, it combines the two necessary ingredients for mystic veneration in contemporary Western society: a vast period of time (“vast” in this context meaning “longer than the length of a Youtube video”) and a vanished, albeit alluringly intriguing, civilization long since conquered, co-opted and commercialized by Western colonialism. There is something amusingly ironic in the way the descendants of the conquerors cling so tenaciously to the concept of mystical wisdom in the procedures and prophecies of the conquered. Is this a manifestation of post-colonial guilt? A desire to embrace Romantic Primitivism and its “noble savage?” Or is it just a function of the ennui brought on by a world where one can own everything but is connected to nothing?

Hell, maybe it’s just a bunch of wacka-doo Hipster nonsense. “It’s called the Long Count. You probably haven’t heard of it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go get a terrible hair cut and make short films about wombats.”

Whatever the cause for the fervent belief in our imminent destruction via Mesoamerican temporal mechanics, the truth of the matter is simple (yet fascinating) and straightforward. The Maya, you see, based many of their astrological and religious calculations on the mystical numbers 13, 20 and 52. They had a calendar of 260 days (Tzolk’in, taken as “count of days” but with a literal meaning of “pieces of the Sun”) and a longer (and more familiar, to modern sorts at least), solar-based calendar that ran for 365 days and was known as Haab’ (“cycle of rains”). The latter of these two calendars is still used in parts of contemporary Central and South America, which just goes to show that reinventing the wheel isn’t always necessary (we will save for another time the implications of failing to invent (or, at a minimum, implement effectively) the wheel in the first place as a factor in the conquest of Central and Southern American peoples). The Maya combined their two calendars to create a “bundle” (also known as a “Calendar Round”), which consisted of 52 Haab’ and coincided roughly with the span of a generation.

Which brings us to the fabled Long Count.

How to account for times and dates that fall outside a 52-year Calendar Round? Well, the Maya used their mathematical smarts and came up with a reliable and easy-to-use system based on their veintenas (20-day periods, similar to a fortnight, with each day having its own “patron” and religious/social significance). How did it work? Well, according to Ian O’Neill over at Universe Today:

The base year for the Mayan Long Count starts at “0.0.0.0.0″. Each zero goes from 0-19 and each represent a tally of Mayan days. So, for example, the first day in the Long Count is denoted as 0.0.0.0.1. On the 19th day we’ll have 0.0.0.0.19, on the 20th day it goes up one level and we’ll have 0.0.0.1.0. This count continues until 0.0.1.0.0 (about one year), 0.1.0.0.0 (about 20 years) and 1.0.0.0.0 (about 400 years). Therefore, if I pick an arbitrary date of 2.10.12.7.1, this represents the Mayan date of approximately 1012 years, 7 months and 1 day.

Simple, right? (OK, actually, there’s more to it than this – MUCH more – but this will give you the general idea).

Every 18 months or so, the Maya had a five-day period called Uayeb. This was considered to be an empty, haunted time, full of portents and a particularly bad time to attract the attention (and, consequently, the ire) of the gods (the Haab‘ did not account for leap years, and so to keep things on an even astrological and agricultural keel, the Maya add this period to their calendar). This fear and awe was magnified even more at the end of a Calendar Round, and became downright monumental with regard to the idea of the Long Count ending. Yet it was the awe and fear that accompanies change, and not that which accompanies destruction; it was more of an “Oh, no, we have to let the TSA grope us WHERE?” sort of fear rather than a “Holy crap, that burning planetoid is plunging toward Earth!” kind of fear. The Maya were understandably concerned about the spiritual and (meta)physical ramifications of such a transition, but remember also that for the Maya, time was cyclical. The end of one period (be it a trecena, veintena, Haab’ or Long Count) was also the beginning of another; another chance to fail, or to die, or to lose, yes, but also another chance to discover happiness, or love, or success. The Maya were no different than modern people in conflating change with potentially negative consequences, but they were no different than we in their willingness to hope, either.

Change can be scary, whether you’re a jade merchant hustlin’ coffee beans with some flinty-eyed Aztecs or a jaded mercenary hustlin’ $6 coffees at Starbucks with some flinty-eyed ad execs. Whatever happens a year from today, it seems like the wisest course would be to look upon the next Haab’ as what it is: a gift. A full year to chase our dreams, love our friends and family, and maybe even stop using that Stairmaster as a clothesrack. Life, like, time, is full of cycles, and the waning days of one as momentous as this should give us cause to examine not only the lives we have lived to this point, but the lives we hope to live in the future, and our expectations for what lies on the other side when the calendar clicks over to 0.0.0.0.1 once more.